A semi truck slid off the southbound side of the interstate and split open in the snow. There must have been hundreds of cans of Budweiser sitting in the snow after the pulled the semi and the trailer away. I don't really think anyone handling the cleanup thought the beer would stay around. I saw beer on the way up to Champaign on the northbound side of I-57. About two hours later, when I was heading south, the place had been picked clean. Lots of tire marks and footprints in the snow. It was salvagers because I know the cleanup people like to travel in a single file to hide their numbers.

I found a really good porno mag in the middle of the road one morning. I know it came from a pickup truck that had just passed me going in the other direction. For 1982, it was pretty explicit but still classy. I almost wrecked the car while driving and looking at it. I finally put it in the back with the spare tire or I would have definitely wrecked the car.

The numerous near misses on the highway gave me the idea of a cursed porno mag that killed everyone who picked it up. I had a couple of chapters done that I tried to shop around. No takers although one day, a guy that looked like Stephen King showed on my doorstep and beat me with his giant Wang (again 1982).

We used to have an employee that was always picking up junk from the side of the road. One day he found a pair of coveralls that somebody had lost the entire contents of their colon in. It also had one of the patches with a guys name on it. That guy came into our parts store a few days later and our employee asked him if he wanted his coveralls back, he'd found them on the side of the road all poo'ed up. The guy just turned around and left..

1) An upside-down Volkswagen Beetle right after it got its tire snagged by a soft shoulder and flipped. It was still spinning like a scene from a Herbie the Love Bug movie.2) A T-shirt for the Mogodore Wildcats football team. It was on the guard rail right by where traffic snarled up on I-99 near Palm Springs, FL. After a week of seeing it every day on the way to work, I hopped out of the car and grabbed it. It was in perfectly good shape, so a quick wash and I wore that shirt for 20 years. I later made a pilgrimage to Mogodore, OH, home of the Wildcats. Beautiful town, Mogodore. I've often considered going back there to retire.3) One time, I was standing on a corner in Winslow, AZ. My Lord, I must have looked pretty strange because this girl in a flatbed Ford slowed down to take a look at me.

Well, a friend of mine in grad school found an old toilet on the side of the road and hauled it into the lab. It sat in the center of the floor, lurking and contaminating us and our experiments, for about two months. Blegh.

A friend of mine and I found a loveseat in the road on US 19 in Clearwater. Figuring it was going to cause an accident, we pulled over and dragged it out of the road. We thought it would be funny just to sit there on it a while and watch traffic go by. Sure enough, a pickup truck comes along with the matching chair in the back. The loveseat had fallen out, and it took them 20 minutes to find a place to turn around and come back for it. For us, finding a loveseat wasn't that weird. For them, finding their loveseat on the side of the road with two goofballs sitting in it waving at them must have been really weird.

Same friend and I found an ancient television outside of Oatman, AZ. That wasn't weird. The weird part was that there was also a couch set up in front of it and other various pieces of living room furniture. Not just jumbled in a pile, but set up like a living room just hangin' out by the side of the highway in the desert.

In the early 80's near Lakehurst NJ, there was a painting company van flipped on its roof in a ditch. A large swash of silver paint on the road and shoulder and two guys head to toe silver standing in front of the flipped over van...they looked like two tinmen from the wizard of oz.

/chuckled for years every time I passed that spot and saw the remnants of the stain.

A chair. It was wooden, high-backed and had leather restraints on the armrests and on the back for the sitter's head and torso. It looked like an old-fashioned electric chair but without any attached wiring. I guess it was some kind of restraint chair. Looked like something you'd see if the Addams family had a garage sale. And there it sat, right in front of a perfectly normal middle-class-type suburban house.

Walker:Sybarite: It's not at all uncommon, but I'm always puzzled by where that one shoe comes from, especially when it still appears to be in pretty good shape.

Passenger side person has one foot hanging out window while they are sleeping and the shoe falls off. Not noticed until they wake up and the driver isn't going all the way back 100 miles to get it.

Too many instances of solitary roadside footware for this to be the explanation. Also, SRF appears in all seasons. I've often seen SRF on top of snow.

The other frequent guess is "accidents, and the EMT cut the shoe of the victim's foot for some medical reason." But the shoes are usually intact, and there is rarely another indication of an accident nearby or another location that the shoe could have rolled from.

I once rounded a curve near on Rt 18 by Rutgers and came upon a bizarre sight: the entire road was strewn with shoes. Whoever was in charge of randomly distributing shoes across all the roads in America must have hit a bump and his stock of SRF fodder bounced off the back of his truck.

*Not my find, but that of one of my friends who was then driving a tow truck for his day job. He picked up the guitar & gave it to me for Christmas... today he's a senior engineer, and I still can't play guitar.

Last fall I found a bunch of broken glass and a rifle along with some skid marks, then I turned the corner and found a dead deer and a rolled pickup with two drunk hunters trying to crawl out from under it.

Apparently they bagged a deer on their first day out and drank all of the beer they had stocked with field dressing the animal/extracting it from the woods. I stopped to help them and one guy asked me to get his rifle off of the road. It was a semi auto with a round in the chamber. At least the safety was on.